Brew Me Tea of Broken Leaves
by loremipsxm
Summary: Crossroads of Destiny AU: Katara and Zuko are never discovered in the Crystal Catacombs. Together, they form a tentative alliance in a city halfway temple, halfway prison. One-shot. [For Zutara Week 2014]


Their faces are netted in tea leaves, dapples of crystalled jasmine and jade, enough to tell their fortunes by. She should have asked Aunt Wu for lessons that long Sunday ago, when she begged to know her life's predictions: when the woman came forth with wisdom gleaned from shatterings of bone. She sees bones now, in these crystals shafting upward, ever towards a stolen light now Fire-Nation won; in her arms, strong and lithe, twined with Water Tribe ribbon. Katara doesn't need another fire to tell what her skeleton says of her. One fire told her everything she needed. (_That's something we have in common_.)

But she needs tea leaves to read the boy in front of her- sitting on her diagonal, really, neither opposite nor beside her. His face is an empty teacup, clouded in minted shadows from the crystals on the walls. He is porcelain she cannot place. China wouldn't do at the poles, and she has no business with it. She cannot tell if this is how he is supposed to look, bare in something close to honesty, no scalding tea to pour and burn- only the dregs clinging to the bottom glaze, inscrutable, untranslated.

They haven't spoken since she offered to heal his scar- since he declined quietly, almost hoarsely, the desire still heavy like honey in his eyes. Yet he didn't. Yet he _doesn't_. He asks nothing of her, not to heal him, not to give herself up, not to explain herself with that imperial flick of the voice she so hates and which he still hasn't used. In return she demands nothing of him. She leaves him to sit, cross-legged and meditating, as she surveys the caverns and remains in silence. It's a brittle truce formed on the neutral ground of a kingdom neither claim.

This is what earthbending feels like. This is the neutral jing, the absence that fills, the trust that is not long-lasting but does not care how long it might survive.

It has been three days. She is starving.

She still half believes that _he_ could survive on stone alone.

* * *

She is sitting on the bridge, dangling her feet into the canal, water running listless through her toes. Fish slip past her ankles, their glassy eyes blind and bitter with the memories of a friend she left behind. Fins flicker against skin, whispers spirited away in a curl of silver scales, and she wonders if this, too, is divination.

Zuko stands on the carved stone shore a few yards off, arms folded, watching her as she fishes. She raises her hands as though cupping the moon in each, and fish come in swirling globules from the waterway, raised in fat raindrops bid from her fingers. They whirl almost peaceably in their green-water cages: a frozen, living rain. And then, a slice from her hand, a wet, gushing thud. The fish writhe stunned and cold on the riverbank. Katara doesn't grimace, says a quick prayer to La. She will not cause them to suffer, but she will do what she must.

This is also her nature.

Zuko muses that this is why he does not speak to her. He doesn't trust those he understands.

* * *

Spring in the Earth Kingdom. Spring in the one of ancient days- too late for cherry blossoms, too late for tasting their perfume on the water. Yet the crystal is perpetual springtime- a blooming of twilight, that rare flash of green seen at dusk kept flush against the lengthening hours. Katara could be underwater, underground, caught in a kettle. It feels like them all at once.

"Why are you here?" she asks him, and there are a hundred ways she wants an answer. He sits beside her now, several arm-spans away, polishing a knife on his apron. She wonders when it was that she stopped expecting it to be lodged between her shoulder blades. (_I'm sorry, _hoarse and melancholy in her ears, eyes that no longer looked like knifepoints, but _gold, gold, gold.) _

The motion of his fingers stops. He holds the knife flat, almost cradled in his lap, shifting it to catch the light. For a moment, his eyes flick far away, as if avoiding the reflection- or slicing half of it entirely, by the way the metal tilts sharply away.

"Not for the Avatar," he says brusquely. He pronounces the word the same way he always has, contempt on the first syllable, desperation on the last. She clenches her fists.

"He has a _name,_" she spits.

Zuko only looks at her. His jaw is clenched into an unforgiving line, and she is reminded of that mouth sneering into her ear, his armour pressed like a dull sword into her stomach as he leered over her to gloat. But his eyes are still the tea server's.

"Do _you_?"

Katara only snorts. She wants to shout it, wants to carve it into that knife of his- _the name of the girl who _beat_ you, who could have _healed_ you- _how dare he threaten her life and her friends but not even know her _name_?

Then it occurs to her that he _does, _that he is the Fire Lord's son, born and bred of formal deeds of truce and surrender, and he is waiting for her to state her intentions to this cease-fire.

She resolves to let him remember it himself.

* * *

"We have to get out of here," Katara says, on the seventh day by her reckoning. She felt the moon swell a few nights ago; it was a new moon when she was taken here. Zuko glances up from his cross-legged concentration, at how the _we _flows from Katara's lips and is gone, as naturally as it came.

"No," he says simply. Katara eyes him, brows narrowed. "It's only been a week."

"_Only_?" she says. "And how long do you intend to wait? Until your father comes to claim the city and put you back as his puppet?" She was doing so well, oh, she was doing so _good_\- but a verbal spar is not the same as a water whip to the throat, she thinks, and she can't take the silence anymore. Not out of her desire to talk to _him, _her rational self knows, but because she is a healer, a born knitter of flesh and of people. Quiet is of the earth; the water speaks.

Fire roars, and this she knows too. "What my _father _does is none of your business," he hisses. "He wouldn't take me back in this- this-"

He cauterizes the line of thought with practiced, scorching fingers, and Katara catches the moment when it snaps.

"Leave, if you're so intent," he says.

"You'd let me?" she asks, gaze tightening.

"The Avatar doesn't know where you are," he says matter-of-factly. It's a commanding, debriefing tone, as though she were one of his soldiers. "He'd have found you by now. I have nothing to gain from you."

"I'm so sorry I can no longer be your _tool,_" she says, hands on her hips, and immediately Zuko splutters.

"No, I-" he says quickly, eyes flashing with a look she can only remember paired with snow and her brother's war paint; with her spirits-blessed boy, orange and bright and heavens away. The memory of them lances her like a cracked rib turned inward. Spirits, she _misses _them.

But she doesn't miss that mirrored flash Zuko's eye as he nearly says something and swallows it, and it reminds her of Sokka, when he thought himself their village's only warrior.

"Wait for three days," Zuko says, the expression gone as soon as he makes it.

"Because?" Katara prods. She is not his subject and he is not her lord, and _spirits _she will go mad if she doesn't talk to someone.

"Because _that_," he says with a barely concealed snarl, "Is how long it will take my father to decide what do to with us."

* * *

"You said you were _cursed,_" Katara mentions on the ninth day, as she swoops into a stance low to the ground. It seems so long ago, when they first put down their weapons in exchange for their confessions. Starvation sounds in her strides now, though she ignores it, concentrating on how her water whip sings through the air with a crack. She can still dare to hope here, since children of the Water Tribes are born of glacier hard as rock, and they do not die until old age takes them.

There is little else to do but train in the meaningless intervals between midnight and high noon, when one of them can tell the time. Katara wonders is this constitutes aiding the enemy. She wonders if _he _constitutes the enemy.

(_My face. I see.) _

Zuko doesn't pause in his katas; they are basic, drilled in to the point of mindlessness, his face blank with concentration turned inward. Bursts of fire dazzle the edges of her vision, like phosphenes that glitter hard in her eyes. It's strange to watch him firebend without expecting the recoil, without anticipating the tearing of heat against skin from a jet of fire lashed at her face. To watch the bare bones of a kata that was once in combat used against her –there the swipe that dissolved her shields, here the thrust that knocked her into the oasis gate- is to watch his silent admission that he didn't emerge fully formed to terrorize.

He still hasn't answered her question when he stops, drawing himself up to full height. Right hand to left, fingers to wrist, he traces his veins (they run blue, she thinks, and so do hers) down his left arm, through the heart, out the opposite- a gentle stance so at odds with his previous that Katara recognizes it immediately for what it is.

Waterbending.

"You've gone too soft," he simply says on the exhale, voice flat and biteless, "If your masters let you talk while training."

She watches him do the move again- a slow, ginger arc from wrist to collarbone and back again- thinking that it feels too much like home.

* * *

Azula comes on the tenth day, at high noon. Katara swallows, blood rushing in her ears- hers or the princess', she doesn't know. She clenches her fist in an instinctive bid to crush it, though she doesn't know what would draw her to the impossible.

Beside Katara, Zuko stiffens.

"You're like a roach, Zuzu," Azula says pleasantly, hands laced primly behind her back. "So hard to kill."

"What do you want?" Zuko growls.

She sneers at Katara, smile like a wound. "Not your little concubine."

Katara lunges: but she's anaemic, moon-deprived and ashen, and Zuko grabs her shoulder before she can draw blood. She startles at the touch, at how his fingers curl into the curve of her shoulder as though he's handling something fine.

"It's good to see she knows her place," Azula smiles, "Father assumes that you do as well."

Breathing is shallow. The catacombs are no longer neutral ground: no holy words can coat the aqueducts and plead a benediction. Katara readies herself to bolt to the river, to take a dagger to both of their throats and take this city back. She waits. She will remain waiting- she can topple whole dynasties if only they let her come in close.

(_Know thy enemy, and know her well.)_

"Father has presented you with an extraordinary opportunity," Azula continues. The gathering light is green on her face; corpse-light. Katara strains to hear. "We both know that you've proved yourself a failure to the throne. Yet father somehow still has _faith _in you." She's jennamite, Katara thinks, a sweetness that will crush your ribs. "Prove that you can rule by the time the comet comes, and perhaps Father will reconsider."

Zuko's voice is tight. "What are you saying?"

Azula rounds, wheeling predatorily on feet that make full contact with the earth with every step, that bid the very ground to listen.

"He's given you the Earth Kingdom."

* * *

And when Katara sees the palace draped in a three-pronged flame (one to pierce her family, her pride, her heart), she thrashes her hands against Zuko's chest and waits for the hollow sound.


End file.
